By Thomas Gerbasi
Shannon Briggs didn’t deserve a shot at the world heavyweight title last Saturday night. It isn’t even fair to say that he gave a career-defining performance in defeat against Vitali Klitschko in Hamburg, Germany. But there’s a reason the fight world is talking about the Brownsville, Brooklyn native, and it has everything to do with both the bad and great parts of this game that is anything but a mere sporting event.
For 12 rounds, Briggs was on the wrong end of Klitschko’s left jab and right hand, particularly the right hand. The 38-year old’s return fire was sporadic and pawing at best, with little of the fire or brimstone that saw him send 45 of his 51 pro victims to defeat by knockout. No, Briggs was every ounce of 38 years old, showing nearly two decades worth of toil on his face.
Sure, he could still talk a great game, which allowed him to secure a title shot despite victories over a trio (Rob Calloway, Dominique Alexander, and Rafael Pedro) that couldn’t buy a ticket into the top ten in the world. And we were fine with that, because the division is in dire need of compelling personalities and knockout artists, and Briggs certainly filled the bill, at least on paper.
Yet from the time the bell tolled at the O2 World Arena until the anticlimactic but clear-cut unanimous decision victory for Klitschko, the idea of Briggs winning the fight never crossed anyone’s mind. Who knows, maybe the brash Brooklynite even knew that this was the last hurrah, the last big payday, and the final shot at a title, and that he still wasn’t going to win.
That didn’t stop him.
No one would have batted an eye if his trainer Herman Caicedo did what he should have done and stopped the fight any time after the eighth or ninth rounds. If referee Ian John-Lewis did his job, Briggs might not have gone to the hospital with as ESPN.com’s Dan Rafael reported Sunday, a broken nose, broken left orbital bone, or torn left biceps.
The typically cynical fight world would have even given Briggs a pass if one of those thudding right hands sent him to the canvas for a ten count or if he simply gave a silent signal to his corner that he had enough.
That wouldn’t be good enough for Briggs though. If this was his last stand, he was going to do what every fighter says he is willing to do, and that’s go out on his shield. As he declared in a statement Monday morning, Briggs even took the spotlight off his trainer, saying, “Despite prior reports, throughout the contest my trainer, Herman Caicedo, wanted to stop the fight, but I made it clear that stopping was not an option.”
An admirable move by Briggs to deflect blame? Yes. A valid excuse for Caicedo not having the guts to pull the plug on the fight and allow his man to go back home to his family without a series of preventable injuries and head trauma. No.
But Briggs, if anything, is stubborn, and at this point, you don’t know whether to praise him or criticize him for such a decision to battle on, given the fact that in this sport, a bad night could land you in the hospital or worse. But he did it, and you have to wonder if the first loss of his career, in 1996 to Darroll Wilson, played a role in his decision to carry on, put the prospect of winning to the side and just gut out what should be the final fight of his career.
In the Wilson fight, a highly publicized HBO debut for Briggs, he threw everything but the ring stool at Wilson, ran out of gas, and got stopped in the third round, watching a 25-0 record turn to 25-1. His trainer at the time, future ESPN commentator Teddy Atlas, turned on him to the media and left the fighter. The fight became a Scarlet Letter of sorts for Briggs, who always had to deal with questions about his desire or ability to succeed and push on when the going got tough.
“I learned a lot from him, and I took a lot of hurt from him," Briggs told me in 2001, referring to Atlas. "They said I was a quitter, blah, blah, blah. But it's not valid to me, because I don't know what fight I quit in. The Darroll Wilson fight, he won. I tried to steamroll the guy, I got dead out of breath, and he won. I moved on, I fought fights. I fought (George) Foreman, close decision. I fought (Lennox) Lewis. I'm here to stay. As far as the writers, they can make or break you. They'll write bad about you today. You win, and they turn that all around."
The boxing media never really turned around though. Even mainly positive stories had that touch of ‘well, we know what happened in the Wilson fight, so who knows if Briggs is legit or not.’ It cut him deeply, though he never really showed it, as he was always quick to dish out a joke, some trash talk, or a story that let you know about the inner workings of the boxing world that few are privy to. But in 2006, he did admit, "After me and Teddy [Atlas] split, everyone came raining down on Shannon Briggs. It was target practice and I couldn't do anything right. It took me years on top of years to grow thick skin and it took me many hurtful days. There were so many incidents, whether it was HBO or Larry Merchant or someone else, where somebody would pull my name out of a hat and say something derogatory about me. It took years, but it also built character because I said I'm not stopping. It hurt me, but now I've got thick skin."
In the ring, he slowly fought his way back. There was the controversial win over Foreman, the courageous effort against Lewis, disappointing performances against Sedreck Fields and Jameel McCline, and finally a world title victory over Sergei Liakhovich in 2006. He lost the title in his very next fight against Sultan Ibragimov, but he was back in a title fight three years later, and one win away from improbable glory and a storybook ending to a career that was supposed to set the standard for heavyweight champions. And he knew it. When I asked him before the Liakhovich fight if he even deserved a shot at the belt, he was as candid as ever.
"You're going to hear people say, 'Shannon doesn't deserve a shot,' and I'll ask them, 'Who does?' Look at the state of the heavyweight division and boxing -- who cares who the heavyweight champion is? I don't care. They're making a big thing that I don't deserve a title shot. Big deal, I want a big fight, and this is a big fight. Forget the title; this is the No. 1 guy. I beat him and I'm the No. 1 guy, and I can go out and promote the sport. That's what it's about. I want to be the man, and there's big money in this sport if you promote it properly. And I'm the guy. I know how to smile, I know how to kiss babies, I know how to walk old people across the street. [Laughs] I know how to do all that, and I'm good at it. There was a time when people respected and knew who the heavyweight champion of the world was."
At least here in the United States. Everywhere around the world, the Klitschko brothers, Vitali and Wladimir, have rightfully earned their respect as the top big men in the game. In the US, few mainstream fans know or even care who the champion (or champions) of boxing’s glamour division is. That’s unfortunate, but it is reality. And Shannon Briggs not becoming heavyweight champion again is reality as well.
Yet that’s nothing for him to hang his head about. Not winning a heavyweight championship is a fact of life for the majority of challengers. Most fighters will never even fight for a belt, and still others will compete but go away with a whimper, wondering what might have been had they left everything they had in the ring.
Briggs will not have to deal with such ‘what ifs’ about what he did in the ring last Saturday. Sure, he may wonder if a better training camp, a strict adherence to a rock-solid game plan, and some luck could have turned the tables. But as far as courage and effort is concerned, there are no such questions. It’s easy in the fight game to be the hammer. Few have the inner strength to not only be the nail, but to be in that role for 12 three minute rounds.
If you had any doubts about Shannon Briggs’ heart, you don’t have them anymore. The Darroll Wilson fight has now been put to rest. It’s about time. Too bad it took 14 years, 7 months, 1 day, and 12 rounds to do it.